Shoah (1985)

So here I am, reviewing the unreviewable. Indeed, when I started watching the film I wasn’t sure I’d write about it at all, cos what exactly can you say about it… it’s a nine-hour-plus documentary about the Holocaust, and I don’t expect to ever watch another film quite so heavy in my life (I mean, god/dess, I hope not). What do I say about Claude Lanzmann’s film, beyond noting that it exists and what it does? As this review notes, actually reviewing it is near impossible; I’ve never believed in the idea that worthiness of subject matter necessarily renders something immune to criticism (I don’t believe Schindler’s List, for example, should be treated as some sort of sacred object and shown without adverts on TV or anything like that, as it often is, just because it’s about the Holocaust), but I find myself floundering somewhat when it comes to approaching this as a film rather than a collection of testimony.

Ordet (1955)

I’m in the middle of watching Shoah at the moment (post forthcoming), and opted for a rewatch of this as a bit of a light interlude. Of course, it’s only in such a context that Ordet can be called “light” even ironically; for the last 21 years, since I first saw it on SBS back in 1991, it’s always been kind of my supreme example of Serious and Difficult European (and More Specifically Scandinavian) Art Cinema. Carl Dreyer is someone I haven’t been in any great rush to reappraise, and indeed it’s probably been the better part of two decades since I last watched Ordet. I was so much younger then, I’m older than that now, to paraphrase that Zimmerman fellow, and I’ve gained rather more experience with the amazing world of cinema in that time. As such, I’m sure I have a greater appreciation of the artistry involved here; Ordet is a feast for fans of the long take, of which Dreyer was a clearly highly skilled proponent. And yet I admire it only at some distance. Ordet is a perplexing work by two difficult men (Dreyer and Kaj Munk; what a complicated character he seems to have been), a religious drama by an apparently not especially religious man at the end of which a madman who thinks he’s Christ resurrects the dead after he’s regained his sanity. I really don’t know what to take away from it. These days I’m inclined to agree with Wittgenstein’s opening to the Tractatus, i.e. the world is everything that is, although I think the sum total of “everything that is” is far larger than some people would have you believe. Consequently I don’t really believe in miracles of the kind the film offers at the end, at least not as supernatural events violating natural law, so I feel rather hamstrung by the climactic resurrection; the religiosity underlying the characters (and their disputes) leaves me somewhat at arm’s length from them, and the ending leaves me similarly remote from the film itself (it actually bothers me now for some reason as a 37 y.o. agnostic more than I think it did as a 16 y.o. atheist). I appreciate the film’s artistry, like I said, but I don’t know that I actually like it, never mind love it.

Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1983)

After Harakiri I was in the mood for something a bit less heavy. Solution: dive back into the DVD library for some Hong Kong action, and a particularly wild example of same (also one not to be confused with Tsui Hark’s own remake from 2001). Ropey though some of the effects might… well, do look in this day and age, they were state of the art in 1983 and groundbreaking for a film industry not used to them. Tsui imported American technicians to show the Hong Kong crowd what to do, and the result was an extravaganza that’s still kind of staggering, especially in its self-evident and unswerving commitment to Doing All The Things. So determined is it to be a mind-melting explosion of sheer Stuff Happening that it almost succeeds in making you realise the actual plot doesn’t really kick in until over half an hour in; up to that point it’s a long introduction to our main characters, a pair of somewhat odd couples (a Buddhist monk and his disciple; a travelling scholar and a soldier escaping a battle who becomes his disciple). That plot is kind of a thin one; they have to destroy the Blood Demon before it reincarnates, said mission involving a quest to recover two magic swords. Complications ensue when the scholar becomes the embodiment of evil along the way. The simplicity of the good-vs-evil conflict is nice, and the “Chineseness” of some of the details (cf. Sammo Hung’s monstrous holy eyebrows) gives it an obvious flavour, but really it’s about pure spectacle; it’s a film that shouts at you to look at it, see the tricks it can do, marvel at the amount of business it crams into just over 90 minutes, and try not to worry too much about the abruptness of some of the storytelling. At times like this, that sort of thing is just about perfect.

Harakiri (1962)

DVDBeaver’s review describes this film as “seething”, and that strikes me as perfectly apt, for Harakiri does nothing if it does not seethe. There is rage bubbling away under the surface of the film; it’s a slow-burner that lets its anger come forth in fairly measured fashion, but it builds up to a terribly satisfying climactic outburst. The story is set in the early years of the shogunate, when many former warlords have been divested of their domains and thousands of new ronin suddenly find themselves struggling to survive without their former masters. Some have been pestering various noble houses, threatening to commit harakiri on their properties, hoping to be given work or at least be sent home with money. But the House of Iyi are less inclined to that sort of generosity. So when Tsugumo rocks up asking for a place to commit harakiri, he’s given the story of how the last ronin to do so was forced to carry out harakiri after all… but when he’s not deterred by this, suspicions start to grow. As the film unfolds, the reasons why Tsugumo’s come to the Iyi despite their reputed “martial valour” become clear and that anger spills out, anger at the general social situation created by the shogunate and at the specific viciousness of the Iyi, who are ultimately more concerned with appearing honourable rather than actually being honourable. At 133 minutes, it’s a slow burner like I said, but I thought it was rivetting; Tatsuya Nakadai is intense as Tsugumo (although I could never escape the fact that he was too young to be playing someone who must’ve been in his mid-40s), and Kobayashi is obviously on top of what he’s doing as far as building up tension and finaly releasing it goes. Terrific stuff, and amazing to think his next film after this would be the couldn’t-be-more-different Kwaidan (which I really must rewatch soon)…

Mother Joan of the Angels (1961)

I know it’s reasonably late at night now and it should be getting colder, but I’d almost swear this film has made the temperature in here plummet… brrr. Anyway, I bought The Devils today and we’ll see that in due course, but tonight I watched this slightly earlier retelling of the tale of the devils of Loudun, transposed to Poland. It’s not a literal rendering of that event, rather an adaptation of it, and produced, obviously, under markedly different conditions to what Ken Russell could (just about) get away with a decade later. As such, it’s a markedly less hysterical film, which is fine; Jerzy Kawalerowicz obviously just had differing concerns, such as the creation of a sustained mood of subtle disquiet. Although the film feels rather leisurely as the tale unfolds (priest comes to convent to investigate claims of possession at a convent, exorcism ensues), once I got into its rhythm I started to feel quite unsettled by it; there’s a scene where the priest has a confrontation with a rabbi—both roles played by the same actor—that really rattled me. I don’t think I’d classify the film as horror per se like IMDB does, but it unnerved me in a way comparatively few “real” horror films do… I can’t quite explain why but the whole film is suffused with a sense of Things Not Being Quite Right, though there are relatively few overt signs of this wrongness; I think the sense of isolation the film creates is a big part of it, though. It’s a few centuries in the past, there’s remarkably little sense of a bigger outside world, and whatever’s happening is doing so a long way from civilisation. In the limited world Kawalerowicz depicts, it seems equally likely that literal demons are at work as it does that the film’s ultimately tragic events are the product of madness, and that love (which the rabbi says is at the heart of everything) and madness are not exactly far apart. Grim stuff.

La ronde (1950)

This is another one of those films that I can’t help but feel is in the wrong language—had it been in German I might’ve found it easier to believe I was watching something set in Vienna rather than Paris—but, as the DVD interview with Alan Williams helpfully observes, France was literally the only place in the world that Arthur Schnitzler’s notorious play could’ve been filmed (Schnitzler’s heirs didn’t control the French performing rights like they did in the rest of the world). Williams also makes an interesting point about Schnitzler having perhaps viewed his own play as being unperformable, both because of the subject (People Fucking) and the structure (ten scenes arranged in somewhat circular pattern), interesting because the film struck me as curiously cinematic and theatrical at the same time… the opening scene is perhaps the strongest example, a massive single take (Williams, again, theorises that Ophüls essentially just found editing too hard, hence his propensity for these longer takes) with the camera roving about as the scene moves from a brazenly obvious set to what feels far more like a real street—all in one five-minute take, mind you—but which we know must be as actually artificial as the set we saw at the beginning of the shot. Ophüls arguably trumps this when he breaks into a scene to show his “meneur du jeu” (himself a fairly grand bit of artifice) snipping out a bit of film while muttering “censored” before returning to the scene. It’s all an exercise in style rather than substance (the booklet essay felicitously describes the film’s approach to its many actors as giving them “sustained cameos”), and I have to admit to finding it somewhat empty. As with Le plaisir, I found the DVD extras gave me more appreciation of what Ophüls was actually doing, but I still found something kind of hollow about the whole thing.

Hangmen Also Die! (1943)

I have something of a mixed reaction to this one. On the one hand, it embodies what I’ve always felt about films of this sort, i.e. they really shouldn’t be allowed to crap on too long in case the thrills dissipate and become diffuse. On the other hand, Fritz Lang still succeeds in wringing out an atmosphere of enormous tension and claustrophobia throughout. Of course, the subject matter—the (fictionalised) aftermath of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in 1942—is Hugely Serious Stuff, cos in the real world this happened; no doubt Lang was sensitive to possible charges of exploitation of a ghastly event in making what was, basically, propagandist entertainment and felt he had to make something more than a standard thriller (and Bertolt Brecht wouldn’t have worked on such a thing anyway, I’m sure). And in large part I suppose he succeeded at that; it is massively dark, and these are some of the most horrible Nazis to walk across a movie screen in any film of this kind (particularly Alexander Granach’s titanically loathsome Inspector Gruber; there’s also a fascinating discussion here of a scene cut from the film’s end that truly seals their infamy), and yet I still couldn’t help but feel it was longer than really necessary. In spite of which, its power is still worthy of respect, and its propagandistic force is carefully tempered by a degree of moral ambiguity present in the good Czech characters (the resistance’s framing of a collaborator for Heydrich’s murder to divert the Nazis from the real assassin is, let’s face it, pretty grim stuff). As a final note, I was interested that Hanns Eisler was Oscar-nominated for his score, but, well, I don’t actually recall hearing much music in the film apart from the “no surrender” song; I was actually struck by how many scenes in the film didn’t have music where you’d expect there to be some. That puzzles me like Glenn Erickson’s jump cut puzzled him…

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935)

What an odd film. Odd that a Hollywood studio would adapt this play in the mid-30s, a time when Hollywood served up fantasies by the dozen but not of this kind; even though the success of Max Reinhardt’s theatrical production of 1934 was what moved Warner’s to make it, it still seems like a curious choice. And odder still that Warner’s made it, too; I could imagine MGM doing it more easily than them. I have to admit this was one of big Bill’s plays I’ve not only never read but I knew almost nothing about it—though obviously I recognised some of the lines just because Shakespeare’s so ubiquitous in the language—so I had only a dim idea what I was in for. And to some extent I suppose I got what I was expecting, which was, you know, a 1930s high Hollywood spectacle. On which level, of course, it really is something special; on reflection I suppose this actually is the Shakespeare play best suited to the big spectacle tendencies of that period. It’s a veritable extravaganza of cinematography and production design, winning the Oscar for the former, and it let Reinhardt indulge in some tricks I don’t suppose even he could’ve pulled off on stage. There is something inexplicably yet hugely moving, too, about that ballet where the fairies depart. I’m less convinced by the people who actually perform in this astounding set. Dick Powell apparently later admitted he didn’t fully understand his dialogue, and a little of Mickey Rooney’s screeching Puck goes a long way indeed; conversely, the incongruous casting of James Cagney actually works rather well, he’s very obviously enjoying himself as Bottom. On the whole I suspect it’s a film with more things in its favour than against it, once you look past the oddity of its very existence; alas, for whatever reason, it flopped at the box office and ended Reinhardt’s limited career. Obviously stage success was no guarantee of screen success even for him…

Flying High (1980)

Yes, I know that’s not the original title, but in this country we know how to spell “aeroplane” correctly and it will only ever be Flying High to me. But never mind that. This is one of my favourite films, which is why it may seem odd that I’ve never actually owned a copy of it. Never even taped it off TV back in the day or anything. And yet if it’s on TV—as it was tonight—I’ll watch it almost every time. (I have a similar relationship to Blazing Saddles, for what it may or may not be worth.) I don’t know how many times I’ve seen it, but it must be rather a lot, and it stands up well for me after I don’t know how many repeats… The genius of the thing, of course, is the way in which Zucker Abrahams & Zucker cast actors best known for straight roles and got them to play it as straight as they normally would; accordingly, the best thing the film does is reveal the hitherto untapped comedy potential of Leslie Nielsen (who plays straighter than almost anyone else in the film), paving the way for what I’m increasingly sure was the ZAZ team’s masterpiece, the Police Squad TV series. It’s the cinematic equivalent of comfort food, to some extent, something you’ll watch because you’ve seen it often enough that you know what’s going to happen, although in this case it’s been long enough since I did last watch it that I’d forgotten a few of the jokes (particularly the one where you think Robert Stack is looking at himself in the mirror until he moves forward out of the doorway). One of those films that’s just nice to revisit when you want something familiar and unthreatening; delightful to be reacquainted again tonight.

In Nacht und Eis (1912)

In this day and age, when almost everything seems to be on DVD within minutes of its theatrical release, it’s remarkable to think that a film could be considered lost “forever” within two years of its appearance. Such was the case with the second film about the sinking of the Titanic (the first one apparently is indeed lost forever): In Nacht und Eis was thought to have vanished some time in 1914 until it reappeared in 1998, boosted by the hype over young Mr Cameron’s retelling of the story (although I also read that the BFI had held a copy for decades without realising). Rather than encourage Cameron’s “retrofit all the films in 3D!” fetish by revisiting Titanic on the big screen, I chose to look at this instead. (It’s on YouTube if you want to do the same.) It’s a fairly compact melodrama (albeit a longish one for the time at 35 minutes) which seems to have learned a few lessons from Griffith while also manifesting some of the tableau vivant tendencies of early cinema (cf. the scenes where the first officer is sending radio messages for help and you see people running past the window of the telegraph room); while most of the interiors are evidently outdoor sets, as was usual at the time, I did rather like the way the camera rocks about to simulate motion on the sea, I don’t suppose that was a common trick in 1912. One thing the film does kind of lack is much in the way of human interest, there are no really defined characters (I don’t know if any of them are even named), but then again with only 35 minutes I suppose spectacle was deemed to be the main thing… then again, considering the “human interest” Cameron brought to his film, maybe this one is better off after all. Maybe it’s of historical interest now more than anything, but I quite liked this.